The Wreckage - Michael Crummey

From the award-winning author of River Thieves comes a sweeping novel of love crossed by the blindness of faith and fate.

In a remote Newfoundland outpost at the onset of the Second World War, the young Catholic Wish Furey meets the passionate, independent sixteen-year-old Protestant Sadie Parsons. They begin an intense affair that is cut short as prejudice and mistrust drive Wish away, into the British Army and the war. At home in Newfoundland, Sadie turns her back on her family and moves to St. John's to wait for Wish-until she receives word that he is dead.

Fifty years later, Sadie returns to Newfoundland to scatter her American husband's ashes and to face her past-one that will come to meet her as she never imagined.

Masterfully crafted, The Wreckage is both compulsively readable and a penetrating study of the reach and limits of love, the depths of human hatred, and the ultimate impossibility of knowing another or oneself.